You may be familiar with or even
have used the beautiful texture collections available at Marlin
Studios: www.marlinstudios.com

They also have looping or animated videos, typically used by architects
for walk-throughs: People in Motion, Trees, etc...

There are two samples for free viewing in the People-in-Motion
collection,. One of them is named MarkSmall and has a subfolder with a
sequence of 300 Jpeg images of a walking man. There is another
subfolder with 300 jpeg images containing the Alpha channel, one for
each color image.

You can easily load just a subset of the frames. For example, the first
40 frames or so appear to be a full walk sequence. Load those through
the Animation menu:

menu: Animation
> Load Sequence...

You can click-drag-select the range of files you want to load. You can
also Shift-click and Control-click to add/remove specific files, for
example if you want to grab only a sparse selection.

If your images don't appear in the dialog window, be sure to specify
the type of files you're looking for. The default is the Targa format
(*.tga files). If you are looking for Jpeg images, be sure to specify
it in the search 'Pattern' field:

Then click "Load
Selected" and Dogwaffle will build an animation from the image
sequence. PD Pro gets busy loading the selected files into a new
animation.

The image sequence is loaded one image file at a time. Once loaded,
you'll have an animation of the size of the images and the number of
frames based on the number of files you selected to load.

Filmstrip mode in the
Timeline scrubbar (click to enlarge)

While playing the animation you
may notice a slight hickup near the end - there are a few too many
frames, and the legs jump back 2-3 frames. Delete the last frame and it
improves.
Delete another one or two and it will be perfect - a total of 38 frames
(numbered 0 through 37) are all that's needed for one looping walk
sequence.

Now you can start applying all sorts of filters to that loop. Edge
detection, Mystic vision, light diffusion, noise, jitter.... You may
need to quickly get access to the unfiltered original. To do so, we
recommend that you use

menu: Animation > Save...

to save the current clip as a .dwa (Dogwaffle Animation) file. This is
uncompressed but saves and reloads the fastest and with the fewest
clicks (no codec selection needed).

Sample walking man:
Mark (Small)

alpha channel:
Original is 300 frames and
includes several walk steps, exactly 10 seconds when played at 30
fps

here's a subset of the sample:reduced to just one
looping walk sequence of 38 frames:shortwalk.avi
(147 kb)

Looking
Forward

Having loaded the animation into
PD Pro, w can do a number of things with it.

-
Example 1

Transfer the animation into the brush. Use the animated brush
timeline editor to apply filters across the frames of the brush,
such as edge detection. Then use the Brush Keyframer to place and
animate the new brush image sequence across the frames of a new
background animation, starting with black. Keyframe the size to
small and reduce the opacity. Repeat this with a larger size and
higher opacity to place the walking person in a nearby position that
appears closer because of the size. Repeat again for a 3rd
person. Then once more close to the right edge.
A different approach is then used for another person, i.e. we also make
the brush move from right to left, and fade.